Rolling Stone settled the defamation lawsuit filed by a University of Virginia fraternity over a false story about a rape on campus, agreeing to pay $1.65 million on Tuesday.

The lawsuit stemmed from the 2014 story “A Rape on Campus,” published in Rolling Stone by Sabrina Rubin Erdely. The story detailed the sexual assault of a woman identified only as “Jackie” at the Virginia Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

The story was officially retracted in 2015 after a police investigation did not find any evidence to back up the story. News outlets also began to question Jackie’s story, and once again did not find any evidence to confirm her account.

The fraternity sought $25 million and settled for $1.65 million. Phi Kappa Psi plans to donate a “significant portion” to groups that provide sexual assault awareness education, prevention training, and victim counseling services, according to the Associated Press.

“Rolling Stone and Erdely had an agenda, and they were recklessly oblivious to the harm they would cause innocent victims in their ruthless pursuit of that agenda,” the fraternity’s lawsuit said.

Naturally, the liberal mainstream media – which anxiously reported on the hoax – is not nearly as interested in reporting on the correction. Because they have their agenda of blaming men for the free choices that women make. But it’s not just liberal mainstream media that pushes the rape culture myth. At the time this Rolling Stone story came out, I remember that traditional pro-marriage advocates like Brad Wilcox gleefully tweeted the false rape accusation story, and then had to take it back later. So this was by no means seen through at the beginning, except by men’s rights activists who were familiar with the nature of false rape hoax stories. “Pro-marriage” people are anxious to prove that they can fit in with liberals, and if they have to denigrate men to do it, they will.

This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.

But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Usually no charges are filed against the women, or if charges are filed, then they get off without jail time. Meanwhile, men falsely accused of rape spend years in jail, until the women finally admits she made the whole thing up. The presumption is that women always tell the truth, and that evidence isn’t needed to prove her charges.

False accusations in divorce trials

False accusations of domestic violence and sexual abuse are also commonly made during divorce settlements in order to get custody of the children, and the attendant benefits.

Consider this article from Touchstone magazine, by Stephen Baskerville.

Excerpt:

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet patently false accusations of both child abuse and domestic violence are rampant in divorce courts, almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of a legal seminar tells divorcing mothers, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You just have to accuse.”

Among scholars and legal practitioners it is common knowledge that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Elaine Epstein, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases. The Illinois Bar Journal describes how abuse accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” The UMKC Law Reviewreports on a survey of judges and attorneys revealing that disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence are used as a “litigation strategy.” In the Yale Law Review, Jeannie Suk calls domestic violence accusations a system of “state-imposed de facto divorce” and documents how courts use unsupported accusations to justify evicting Americans from their homes and children.

I often hear men, especially men in the church, complaining that young men won’t get married because they are too busy watching porn and playing video games. But maybe the real reason is that they don’t want to be exposed to domestic violence laws and divorced courts that are waiting to separate them from their earnings.

If the church isn’t speaking out against premarital sex (to women) and against no-fault divorce (to women) and against biased domestic violence laws (to women), then they have no one to blame for the so-called “marriage strike” but themselves. Unfortunately, it seems that no one who advocates for marriage has the courage to attack the root cause of the marriage decline: women’s own irresponsible choices. When women choose immoral men and then choose to have sex with them before marriage, they have no one to blame but themselves for the damage that results.

Domestic violence rates

Here’s a recent article in the radically leftist UK Guardian that summarizes the evidence that women commit domestic violence at the same rates as men.

Excerpt:

Domestic violence has traditionally been understood as a crime perpetrated by domineering men against defenceless women. Research spanning over 40 years has, however, consistently found that men and women self-report perpetrating domestic violence at similar rates. Professor John Archer from the University of Central Lancashire has conducted a number of meta-analytic reviews of these studies and found that women are as likely to use domestic violence as men, but women are twice as likely as men to be injured or killed during a domestic assault. Men still represent a substantial proportion of people who are assaulted, injured or killed by an intimate partner (50%, 30% and 25% respectively).

If the empirical research is correct in suggesting that between a quarter and half of all domestic violence victims are men, a question follows: why has women’s domestic violence towards men been unreported for so long, and what has changed in the last five years to make it more visible?

One reason may be the feminist movement. Feminism took up the cause of domestic abuse of women in the 1970s, with the world’s first women’s refuge being opened by Erin Pizzey in 1971. Feminism understood domestic violence as the natural extension of men’s patriarchal attitudes towards women, leading men to feel they had the right to control their partners, using violence if necessary. Feminists campaigned successfully to bring the issue into the public arena, thereby securing resources to establish services to help victims. This activism and advocacy led to governmental and public acceptance that “domestic violence” was synonymous with violence against women.

[…]The dual stereotypes of the violent man and passive woman have undoubtedly obscured the existence of male victims of domestic violence in the past. Men were also unlikely to view their own victimisation as either domestic violence or a criminal assault, and so were unlikely to seek help.

More domestic violence studies from multiple countries are discussed here. They confirm the study discussed above – the rates are similar for men and women. But all the taxing and spending is for women, not men. It’s a huge difference in how women and men are treated, just like there is a difference in concern and spending with breast cancer vs prostate cancer.

I’ve only met one unmarried woman in my entire life who was aware of all of these injustices against men. And yet so many women want to get married, and think they are qualified for marriage. What kind of friend could a woman be to a man, when she only knows about the trendy problems that concern leftists (global warming, rape culture, transgenders in bathrooms, etc.) but nothing about the problems that face unmarried men – especially if they take on the challenges of marriage and fatherhood? The typical young, unmarried woman today (Christian and non-Christian) is pro-abortion, pro-no-fault-divorce, pro-big-government, a radical feminist and anti-male. Why do they think that marriage is something they deserve? What exactly is it that they offer a man?